Tamerlan Tsarnaev, third from left, and Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, second from left, seen at the Boston Marathon before the bombings. / Bob Leonard, AP

by Oren Dorell, @OrenDorell, USA TODAY

by Oren Dorell, @OrenDorell, USA TODAY

WATERTOWN, Mass. - People in this heavily Armenian community are casting doubt on claims by relatives of the Boston bombing suspect that an Armenian convert to Islam was somehow at fault.

"For an Armenian to convert to Islam is like finding a unicorn in a field," said Nerses Zurabyan, 32, an information technology director who lives in nearby Cambridge. "It would be such a shock to the Armenian community that everyone would know this person."

The Associated Press reported Tuesday that relatives of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of the two suspects, say he came under the influence of a man named Misha who preached to him in his kitchen and turned him to a radical form of Islam. Tsarnaev's uncle in Maryland, Ruslan Tsarni, and his former brother-in-law in Kazakhstan, Elmirza Khozhugov, said the man was an Armenian convert who was heavyset, bald, around 30, and had a long reddish beard.

Zurabyan, his brother Zareh, 23, and a couple hundred of their townsfolk gathered outside St. Stephen's Armenian Apostolic Church on Wednesday to commemorate 98 years since the start of the conflict that Armenians recall as a genocide by Ottoman Turks that belongs in the same category as the Holocaust. Before it was over, 1.5 million Armenians died. Turkey denies that it was a deliberate extermination.

A procession of church dignitaries followed by a group of uniformed young people carrying flags and a crowd carrying portraits of genocide survivors walked solemnly down the street.

In 301 A.D., Armenia became the first nation to adopt Christianity as the state religion, Nerses Zurabyan said.

"Our identity and our faith are so intertwined to our traditions that we don't distinguish between one and the other," he said. Over the centuries, as Islam became dominant in the region, Armenians suffered several massacres, he said, "but even in the face of extinction, did not convert."

To Chris Hajian, 39, a financial analyst from Waltham, the Misha story sounded like a fabrication.

"It's a little suspicious, with all the conspiracy theories they've come up with," Hajian said, referring to reports that Tsarnaev's mother said her sons were set up by the FBI and 9/11 was an attack by the U.S. government on its own people. "And now they're looking to blame someone else."